The Language of the Body
by dora1
Summary: I stand in her elegantly understated living room - looking for what? Memorabilia? Evidence of humanity? Things to sell on e-bay?


[Thanks for beautifully beta-ing this, Eirian - you're a star. She's a star]  
  
On the way here, the driving felt strange. Or rather, it didn't; it hardly felt strange at all. My hands on the wheel still remembered the way; I even felt myself beginning to speed at the same just-passed-halfway point, when I passed the Hungarian baker's and knew it would be another ten minutes before I was climbing her stairs.  
  
I found myself glancing into the back seat, as though checking on an invisible pot roast. Once I brought her a bunch of flowers. She thought I was being satirical. 'Or is this some kink I should know about?' she'd asked, leaning against the door-frame. 'Is it Doris Day night? Was I meant to open the door in a pinafore and a permanent wave?' 'You should see someone about those paranoid delusions,' I'd advised her. 'I'm already seeing someone,' she'd said, sticking the flowers in the sink.  
  
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I did the best I could for Lilah. I protected her- against ridiculous odds - from the beast's rampage through Wolfram and Hart. I never betrayed her, professional matters exempted. I did what I had to, however distasteful, to ensure that no demon could rise in her corpse.  
  
It's a convincing argument, but it has its limits. It doesn't affect the occasional nauseous surges in my stomach. It doesn't affect my hands which still, periodically, feel the pressure of the axe shift as it goes through her neck.  
  
The body has a memory and a language of its own, and it's deaf to argument. It's Fred who appears, even now, in my dreams and nightmares. It's her name I sometimes whisper to myself, just because I want to. But my body remembers Lilah. It doesn't understand why Lilah's soft neck should be severed, nor can I make it understand, so it continues to churn and hallucinate.  
  
The language of the body has been a silence to me all my life, but with her my nights became eloquent. And some of my afternoons.  
  
I've communicated, always, through carefully chosen words. She spoke, gambled and transacted using her body, with smirks and sneers and measuring downward glances.  
  
Her long, distracting legs; her all-purpose dazzling smile - so wide and hard and brilliant it might have been polished with Pledge and propped up on broom handles. Her raised eyebrows, the slight, incredulous angle of her head as she listened to you- they were silent, unanswerable messages, banners of cool. Lilah won her spurs on cool, on keeping her nerve through hell and high water - or faking it, which comes to the same thing.  
  
I'm the butter-fingers who apologises. If Lilah smashes a cup, she did it on purpose.  
  
Despite this, she was never the one in control when our bodies were speaking. Hers was too vocal, too volatile. It hadn't learned the small talk of restraint. It was too innocent.  
  
It shocks me, now, to remember how honest she was, wordless, in the dark. I've never seen anything like the transformation that would happen when I touched her. It was like watching an egg un-hardboil itself.  
  
It was like warming cold treacle, seeing it soften and become liquid. I used to steal treacle, out of the kitchen at school. It had a broad, bitter, unclean taste underneath the sweetness. Full of hard metals, I now know. It was luscious and unmanageable, and it adhered to my hands. Well, my hands are clean now.  
  
She'd lay her head in the crook of my neck and I'd know by the tickle of lashes that her eyes were closed. One hand would creep over my chest and arm, close on my shoulder, and then creep on acquisitively. Her face when she turned it to me was like light.  
  
She'd put on her cool with her coat, later.  
  
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I still have the key to her apartment. I found it in her pocket, along with fifty dollars and a powder compact.  
  
I left her in the sewers three months ago, stripped of all assets. Wolfram and Hart, her 'safest place in case of apocalypse', was in ruins, kicked in like a sandcastle. She was wounded; she was unsteady on her feet; the beast was hunting and killing the survivors of its purge. I'd rescued her. I could have done it more thoroughly.  
  
After I'd gone a few paces, she called out after me, all the subtlety washed out of her voice.  
  
I knew how resilient she was, how self-sufficient. She'd be able to evade the beast, to steal and strangle and blackmail her way back to power. Deadly and irresistible as meningitis, I called her once, when I was still bitter and entranced enough to revel in poetic obscenities. I'd made my decision. Black and white. But that urgent, fall-away 'Wesley' from behind me continues to echo.  
  
I heard that unlikely note of entreaty again, on the day of her death. She'd resurfaced unexpectedly, out of a drain. She looked beaten. 'I just want my life back,' she said. 'All my pretty things.'  
  
When I looked closely I saw that her real eyebrows had started to grow in around her carefully tailored arches. Her face was powdered, but not clean. Her cardigan was grubby; her hair looked like she'd styled it with a dustpan and brush. She was still dredging up evil schemes and bulldozer one-liners, but her voice signalled the approach of a collapse that I hadn't thought possible.  
  
Not just her voice. Her words, the 'I want', jarred me, too. Lilah hadn't been in the habit of longing for things she couldn't have. As far as I know there wasn't anything she couldn't do without.  
  
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I stand in her elegantly understated living room - looking for what? Memorabilia? Evidence of humanity? Things to sell on e-bay?  
  
These are her things, the ones she missed enough to bleat about it. The rooms are decorated handsomely, even lavishly, but it's quite bare of any sign of personal attachment.  
  
Her curtains are rough bobbly silk; their subtle shade blends quietly with those of the armchairs and the deep carpet. The effect is charming, but scarcely something to keep a hard-headed lawyer lurking in a sewer-cave for three weeks, nursing a desperate plan and a crowbar.  
  
There's an expensive, good-taste coffee cup on the table, with a circle of mould at the bottom. It's stylish, and it harmonizes with the furniture, but it hardly looks capable of penetrating Lilah's watertight heart.  
  
There's a ladylike stereo on her sideboard, warm cream enamel with silver piping. I've never seen her put a CD on. I can't picture it at all - Lilah losing herself in the strains of Chopin, putting her feet up, reclining in her favourite chair. She had no favourite chair, as far as I know. She didn't even have a favourite sandwich filling.  
  
Her choices were impersonal, always. She got the best. Gavin Park had known where she bought her sofa. He'd probably known where she bought her toothpaste. The lawyers of Wolfram and Hart watched each other keenly as buzzards for signs of weakening, and with similar motivation. Lilah stayed ahead, stayed alive. She didn't have time to fall in love with wallpaper. I never saw her read for pleasure, not even a magazine.  
  
She didn't have a favourite drink, even. In public she would accept nothing but expensive cocktails or single malt scotch; but I've poured her out some real filth before, and watched her drink it with greed and without comment. She'd have calmed her nerves with nail polish remover if there was nothing else at hand.  
  
She watched television like she was looking out of the window of a train. There was nothing she watched every week. She never surfed for docu-soaps or vampire films or pornography. She never bought videos.  
  
I peep into the kitchen. I don't know what I'm expecting; it always looks the same. It's the kitchen of a reasonably tidy person who never cooks. I open the fridge and look in. A lemon, a packet of butter, a jar of jam, another of pickles. She lived off take-aways and toast, principally; although there's still a crust of burnt cheese on the bottom of the oven - I peer in - from a lasagne I brought round five months ago.  
  
The idea of comfort food was alien to Lilah - she wasn't the kind of girl one finds at the bottom of the cookie jar after a hard day. It wouldn't have occurred to her to buy a cookie jar. There are cookies in a packet, open on the sideboard. I may have bought them myself - they're the kind I like.  
  
I throw the packet in the bin and wander into the bedroom.  
  
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Anyone snooping through her belongings - as soft-footed representatives of Wolfram and Hart must have done, as I am doing now - would surely decide that her ruling passion had been shoes. I don't think so.  
  
When I first realised the proportion of her spare time and salary Lilah dedicated to acquiring shoes, I was astounded. I grew up in a world in which footwear was defined by a few broad categories: black shoes, brown shoes, ladies' shoes, Wellington boots and bedroom slippers. Lilah kept people hiding under the bed in designers' hotel suites.  
  
But if I know little of shoes, I know much of shoe-enthusiasts. My first two years in LA left me virtually Secretary of the Shoe-Addiction Convention of California, and I could always tell Lilah's wasn't the true fetishist's thirst.  
  
Cordelia would wail at the sight of a scuff or a stain, and set to work with a host of toxic-smelling restoratives. Lilah jettisoned damaged goods grieflessly, often without so much as a 'damn'. She would as soon have gone to work barefoot as wearing heels that cost under two hundred dollars, but their aesthetic value was nil to her. The perfect shoe was a totem in the circles within which she moved: a shorthand for wealth, confidence and taste, a necessary bluff. An asset when treading on faces, but nothing dearer to her heart.  
  
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There's a row of nail polish bottles on the dresser, in all shades from business-like to film-noir. There are no photographs, no letters or cards. An unopened packet of paper clips; a mobile phone recharger; a bottle of Chanel.  
  
A small plate of crumbs and some congealed smears of butter, which chills me, slightly. She ate that piece of toast not knowing that the sky would rain fire that night, changing everything. She held it in one hand while she rummaged for earrings or stockings. She wiped the butter off her mouth with a tissue - there's one in the bin, crumpled - and coloured in her lips with one sweep, with careless precision as she did everything, a carelessness I'll never achieve. I put my hand on the knob of the top drawer and then take it off again. I'm not going to rifle through a dead woman's underwear drawer.  
  
In the bottom drawer of her dresser I find neat heaps of silky nightdresses, or possibly petticoats. They have no designer labels, and are in soft, rich colours: ashes-of-roses, eau de nil, milky tea, sugar-brown. A cherry-red one, which I bought her myself. 'Sign it first,' she'd said, wearing it. 'As proof. Of now. Of this.' Was that her monosyllabic declaration of love, her lawyerlike clutch at eternity? Perhaps these are her pretty things. Nightdresses, I decide, because I can only remember her wearing them inside. The slips she wore to work were shorter, more expensive, and the colour of cigarette smoke.  
  
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Her bathroom is large, classy and bare. It looks like a brochure - any very upmarket brochure, circa 1980 onwards - except that there's a towel on the floor. One evening, I burst into her apartment while she was in the bath. She hadn't seemed unduly surprised ('Could you stop doing that? The locksmith thinks I have a crush on him,'), but her invitation to jump in was at best lukewarm, which intrigued me. I thought perhaps she was waiting for someone. I thought perhaps Angel was hiding in the closet. Alarmed at these painful and psychotic thoughts, I undressed and climbed into the bath. The bubbles smelled deliciously of honey.  
  
On the day I'm thinking of, there was a large plastic bottle of bubble bath on the side of the sink, and a butter-coloured silk dressing-gown on the towel rail. Lilah's hair had been held out of the water by a green plastic crocodile clip. I'd never seen any of those things before, though I'd grown used to showering in the presence of her toothbrush and hairbrush and nailbrush, her flannel, her shampoo, her eye-drops and tissues and soap and curlers, her green towels and her turquoise towels.  
  
I open the cabinet. Everything's just as I remember it, except that the toothbrush has gone and so have the tissues. There's part of a bloody handprint in the half-rinsed sink. Only Lilah would have come back here with that thing on her trail. I open a cupboard door, and see shelves full of neatly folded towels. She enjoyed folding.  
  
I open another cupboard, a narrow one I've never looked in before, between the lavatory and the shower. The dressing-gown is in there, and on a little triangular shelf, the bubble bath, the green clasp and a round glass jar of sea-coloured bath crystals called 'Lorelei'. Stuck to the underside of the shelf with drawing pins is a row of lavender bags - to combat the aroma of mildew, I suppose. The smell is honey-sweet, with undertones of lavender and damp cupboard. I shut the cupboard door.  
  
These things had a secret meaning, a meaning that no longer exists. Perhaps Gavin Park never penetrated that mystery, and her secret cupboard remained inviolate.  
  
Perhaps it was baths she missed, skulking in the bowels of LA, that thing at her heels. Was that the plaintive note in her voice? Did she weaken for the thought of the quiet, perfumed anonymity of her bath?  
  
Did she dim the lights and lie there listening to the bubbles pop and thinking of nothing?  
  
No lurker in her closet, then, not unless he was a rubber duck.  
  
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'I left you a couple of hundred messages,' she said, smiling at me. 'Don't feel obligated to return any.' She had a generous habit of hyperbole; she made me feel constipated and miserly, meticulously weighing and evaluating every word. Two messages, she left me, the day it rained fire. They're still on my machine. 'Hey. Check out the sound and light show. Call me at the office.' And an hour later, 'Guess you're out battling evil. If you're alive or undead, call me back.'  
  
I didn't call her back. I'd decided she was over. I'd decided there was a line.  
  
She appeared at my door the next day, with a starved, drawn look on her face that evaporated when she saw me. She stepped forward and put her arms around me, laid her hard, powdered cheek against my neck. I'd felt tension fall from her, felt an unscreamed scream gutter from her throat. Her suit jacket, meant for hand-shaking and back-stabbing, not for hugging tallish men, crumpled from the seams. It was as unembarrassed as all her actions, though I'm as sure now as I was then that it was the first and only time in her life she'd done anything of the sort.  
  
She had a startling dearth of personal vanity. Cordelia, Virginia, my mother, my grandmother - I've seen each of them, looking into the mirror: nursing a half-smile, touching her earrings and hair, letting her glance slide up and down, eyeing herself up.  
  
Lilah conducted an auto-MOT. She turned first one side of her head and then the other into the glass, eagle-eyed in search of flaws or fault lines. She stepped back to do the same with each hip, then each foot and leg. For all the loving gazes she exchanged with her own reflection, she could have been a vampire.  
  
She never angled, either crudely or subtly, for compliments about her looks. In fairness to me, I rarely gave her any.  
  
I only remember one. I couldn't help myself; I was dazed by the strange fluidity of her lines; the warm colour of her skin, unshadowed by make-up or stockings or a grey suit; the unarmed look on her face, the absence of the broom-handled smile. 'My God; Lilah; you're so beautiful,' fell out of my mouth like a toad or a jewel, unsuppressed. I felt immediately that I'd lost something valuable - territory, the advantage, my dignity.  
  
But she didn't react with triumph: she barely reacted at all. She reached over me for the glass of water on the bedside table, yawned, 'You should see me on Saturday nights.'  
  
No-one's ever looked at me as she did, with such passionate greed. When I decided to wash my hands of her, I hoped that the Powers would find such a sacrifice to be of merit. A-plus, Wyndham-Pryce.  
  
The thought had stabbed me, earlier, when I saw Fred fall into Gunn's arms with a gasp and sob of blinding relief: there's no-one to hold their breath for my life. Standing in Lilah's relieved and grateful arms, I felt like someone forced to use his last wish on removing the sausage stuck to the end of his nose.  
  
I cast her off for nothing, to die - because let's not mince words, I thought she'd die of blood poisoning if the beast didn't get her.  
  
I'm sitting on the edge of her bathtub, holding on with both hands. I came here with a vague intention of taking something with me to remember her by, but that idea now seems both maudlin and criminal. The towel on the floor is Nile-green, stained grey in patches by a creeping fungus. For the first time I notice the closed-in, dead-flowers smell of the air.  
  
The apartment wasn't hers; it belonged to Wolfram and Hart. I suppose now it belongs to Angel. Does anyone know that it's here? Whoever was once responsible for the information is now, I presume, a zombified corpse - or, rather, a corpsified zombie.  
  
My hands, my shoulders and chest, feel a chill. I know my body better, now. I think perhaps I won't tell anyone, about these empty rooms. I'll feel different, in my head, my arms and legs, all over, knowing her stereo is maintaining its habitual silence, her brown dried blood still patterning the sink, her pretty things waiting. 


End file.
